Revolutionizing Team Culture: Unpacking the KICK Model with Dr. Linda and Brian Schubring

Are you ready to revolutionize your team culture? Buckle up as Dr. Linda and Brian Schubring, our esteemed guests in this episode, shed light on their groundbreaking leadership model, KICK, which is an acronym for Know, Invest, Connect, and Keep. This model is a game-changer for CEOs, team leaders, and anyone eager to comprehend the dynamics of a vibrant team environment keenly. Listen in as Dr. Linda, with her broad experience as the vice president of employee experience and culture in a tech consulting firm, provides priceless insights that can fortify your team culture. Brian, on the other hand, accentuates the potency of intentional leadership and why emotional and mental engagement within teams are critical.

Leaders, have you thought about genuine investment in your people? We unpack how leaders can intentionally invest in their people, both professionally and personally, to foster skill growth and development. The heart of our discussion is around fostering genuine connections with your team members and creating a personal and emotional bond crucial for trust-building. We also touch on how to keep your team engaged, invigorated, and encouraged, and how to maintain their loyalty to the organization long after their tenure. As we wrap up, we guide you through the myriad resources available from Leadership Vision Consulting and express our heartfelt gratitude to our listeners for their precious time. Stay connected with us, there's so much more to learn and explore.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

How is it that we, as leaders, can build the talent of our individual people to strengthen our teams? Because a leader has a profound role in shaping the attitudes, the behaviors, the conduct and the expectations of a team. And if a leader begins to look at their role in shaping the team culture, that can be extremely catalytic for how the team actually grows and evolves.

Speaker 2: 0:33

Hello everyone, my name is Nathan Freeberg and you are listening to the Leadership Vision Podcast, our show helping team leaders build positive team culture. Our consulting firm has spent 25 years investing in teams so that people are mentally engaged and emotionally healthy. Today in the podcast, dr Linda and Brian Schubring will be briefly sharing an overview of our model on developing talent. This episode was actually an excerpt from a longer webinar that they hosted for a group of executives that was focusing on the profound role that a leader has in shaping team culture. In the full, extended webinar, they touched on the four fundamental elements of positive team culture, which you can go back and listen to it. There's a show link in the show notes to learn more about that. But this here, this excerpt that they were going to share today, is going to share our unique leadership model, which is KICK, which stands for no, invest, connect and keep, and this begins to address how leaders can begin to strengthen the let's call them muscles that will help them build the talent of their individual people to ultimately strengthen their teams.

Speaker 2: 1:45

Dr Linda offers some insights from her experience as the vice president of employee experience and culture at a tech consulting firm.

Speaker 2: 1:52

She's going to dive into the importance of positive team culture and is going to provide a little framework on building talent and strengthening teams in that, and then Brian's going to highlight the power of intentional leadership and the importance of the emotional and mental engagement within teams.

Speaker 2: 2:10

Now, whether you are a CEO type, a leader of a team or a team member, or really just someone who enjoys understanding the mechanics of a positive team environment, well, this episode is going to be great to give you an overview of that, but then also a few very practical, actionable steps that you can take with your team today. And if you want even more than that, you can check out some of the resources in our show notes. We include a few things there that are honestly, just a bunch of additional resources to some of the other things that we discussed here, as well as a lot of other resources that we have been developing over the last several years to help you build a stronger team culture. All right, so join us now as we learn more about how to kick, know, invest, connect and keep our employees and evolve teams to their fullest potential. Enjoy.

Speaker 1: 3:06

We're really hoping to sharpen your leadership style to support not only your team and your team health, but also to be able to sharpen who you are as a leader in a way that helps you be more aware of what the individuals need who are on your specific teams. We also want to provide for you some practical strategies that we have found through our research to help contribute to the development of a positive team culture, and also we're going to present to you a model of how to actually lead, to actually build into the health and the well-being of your team. So one part is going to be focusing on the four fundamental elements of positive team culture and the other part of the webinar today is going to focus on four keys to helping you lead the team into this new era of how to live and lead in a positive team culture.

Speaker 3: 4:01

Because maybe you came to this webinar and you thought, wow, yeah, positive team culture, I need more of that. I need more of that, we all need more of that. But then it's how and how do you boil the ocean of that, and where in the world do you start? And so we want to offer a lens, a framework to how you could maybe begin to build talent and strengthen some of your teams, and part of this research comes from my work at a technology consulting company, where I was in-house as the vice president of employee experience and culture and we were using EOS. We were following the traction model. We would use all the different components and have the annual meetings. We actually had an EOS implementer as well, and there were some things that we were learning, and we want to apply that to our work and share with you some of the mysteries that have been revealed as we have began to navigate, like leaders coming to us saying how in the world do we build talent?

Speaker 1: 5:05

So we mentioned earlier that we've been in a lot of organizations and five years ago we really started to ask ourselves what's happening. It's clear when there are leaders that have this vision and they have an intentionality to how they're really engaging their people. So we began to study that and one of the things that we began to realize is that leaders weren't just trying to lead their companies and they weren't just trying to enhance and develop their teams, but there was this theme that was emerging and that was the leaders that really understood how teams were working and where people that were understanding that they were empowering individuals to be emotionally healthy and to be mentally engaged. I'll just think about that for a second to be emotionally healthy and mentally engaged. And so if that is a vision or a goal of who we are as leaders, we have found that there is a certain way that these leaders go about doing that.

Speaker 3: 6:04

But you know, if you have your own business, you want it to be profitable, you want to be successful.

Speaker 3: 6:10

You are concerned about the bottom line and we would say yes, and we really believe in a double bottom line, that you can be profitable and developmental in your approach to talent.

Speaker 3: 6:24

And those of you that maybe are considering how am I going to invest in my leaders in some different ways, sometimes, when you're busy, because I feel this way, sometimes too, it's like let someone else do it, let my HR person do it, let the people person take care of the work. And we've started to realize, and maybe as you look around to your leadership team, how can your leadership team do this together? Because we would say that all leaders, you don't get a pass, you don't just farm this out to somebody else. But we really believe that when you have a leadership team where they individually invest in their people in unique ways guess what that drives engagement, guess what that drives attraction to your company, why? Because employees today and your future employees, they want to be part of organizations where they're seen and they are invested in, and we think that that goes hand in hand with being profitable and developing your people.

Speaker 1: 7:27

So this leadership model that we're going to introduce you to is the acronym KIC Just so happens to be that, and that stands for no invest, connect and keep, and so what we want to do right now is just give you a brief definition on what each of these elements mean and, as you're listening, as a CEO, as a leader, think to yourself which one of these four areas do you think you naturally do? Well, so the first one is no. This seems pretty obvious, but leaders who know how to build teams, lead companies. Well, they know their people, and what we mean by people is they know the people as individuals. They know their family members. They may know where the people live, their kids, their pets' names, maybe their education, the culture they grew up in, the country they grew up in, but just that personal information, the personal data, they just know what that is, and you can be completely surprised at how well you can know someone and not.

Speaker 3: 8:32

So when we've talked to team members, do you know that the leader always asks me about my spouse? I just think that's so cool and they remembered that I had a kindergartner. And it's those pieces, it's those little tiny things. It's not like you need to know someone so in-depth, but just the commitment to know and see somebody.

Speaker 1: 8:52

The second element in the kick leadership model is invest, and this is the specific investment in a person's growth and development. So when you begin to know people, you begin to then uncover some of the areas where they may need growth, where they may need development, and that could be professionally, it could be personally, it could be emotionally, it could be for how they're navigating their here and now, and it could also be your eye towards their future, the vision that you have for them. But that investment piece, it's intentional. It could be team-based, it could be person-based, but the investment itself is one of the things that leaders do. They have this very consciously at the front of their mind.

Speaker 3: 9:35

And oftentimes their leaders are really good at like okay, there's a technology need, I'll do it in a technology investment in this person. I'll grow them up in these skills or those skills, and what we found is that the leaders that really see their people and see them as worthy of an investment, that they would grow as leaders. Guess what.

Speaker 1: 9:57

It helps succession plans and it helps the continuation of the mission of your organization and the third element of the kick leadership model is connect, and this is that relational connecting with someone where you're actually with a team member or a couple of team members and there's a relational nearness to the connect experience. Yes, it can be sitting down for coffee and you're not talking about business, or you are, it could be walking to a different location in the company, but it's the moments where you are with someone, spending time with someone and creating that personal and emotional connection with them that enhances the relationship and ultimately builds trust.

Speaker 3: 10:40

So think about the shared experiences that you've had as part of your team and sometimes yes, it happens around a meal, sometimes it happens around some team building exercise, something outside of maybe the work, the confines of work, and we would say, help your people just interact intersect in some different ways. Maybe it's a pot log, maybe it's some sort of sharing breakfast together, but it could be just more simple as that, like really natural, organic.

Speaker 1: 11:13

And the last one's, keep. And one of the reasons why we think this is so important is that the body of research that is supporting this idea of keep it continues to grow, because we believe that the word engagement in the business culture is an often overused word. But keep is not just keeping engaged. There are many other elements to this. It's how do leaders keep others excited, that excitement that people have, that's contagious and, yes, how do you keep people engaged, and that may differ according to team or person. How do you keep people enthusiastic? Or their energy, their positivity is high? And how do you keep people encouraged? That could be displays of compassion, displays of empathy, it could also be professional encouragement, but how is it? They come alongside and figuratively put your arm around someone and encourage them.

Speaker 3: 12:08

And here's the other part of keep that we don't always talk about but is really important as leaders. Sometimes your company evolves to the place where you have to not keep people, you have to let them go. And this framework says how do you keep people a fan, even when you say, like this, this season is done? How do you keep them a fan of the organization and remind them of how much they've learned and developed their career as they have gone? Now, how do we take action with this? Here is the invitation to take action.

Speaker 3: 12:46

Those of you who are trafficking in the EOS language, perhaps you do people analyzers. We did that on our executive team. We would list all the people in the company and we would do the GWC get it, want it capacity to do it. We would look at each different person. We would see if they were a values fit. Remember plus or minus, see how all that goes. Every once in a while, then, it's looking at your people through this lens. No, invest, connect and keep.

Speaker 3: 13:15

And so maybe, as we have been talking, there's a team member that you really want to know in a different way or all of a sudden it came clear to you there's a team member that you want to invest in, and maybe it just made sense how you want to create that kind of investment or connection, that kind of investment, as well as keeping and keeping people engaged or keeping them encouraged, because maybe that's your October goal and maybe that's the week kind of goal. But the second one is what are you going to do in seven days? So once again, nice to talk about a little bit harder to do I would say to you and that's why to-dos work right what are you going to do in seven days? Pick one of these areas and get to know some of them better, or connect a group of people in a different way and tell a colleague about this that you're going to do it. So you have a little bit of accountability.

Speaker 1: 14:16

And, lastly, just cheers to the positive team culture, and we say that because that is our goal, but we also know that it's a challenge. And the last thing that I want to say is that we all know that the emotional health and well-being of the CEO that's also contagious and it can project into the company. When we take care of ourselves, others are inspired to do the same, and I really believe that if we all have the goal of creating positive team cultures, it really comes down to how is it that we can create for ourselves emotional engagement, being mentally healthy, and how is it that we can promote that same element in our people.

Speaker 3: 14:59

So thank you for your time today, thank you for the listen, thank you for joining us on this journey.

Speaker 1: 15:06

And thank you very much.

Speaker 2: 15:09

Thank you for listening to the Leadership Vision podcast and, as you reflect on the insights that you hear heard here today, let's just remember that the power that each one of us holds as leaders in shaping our teams and the environments that we have the power to create. Leadership isn't just about guiding. It's also about listening and understanding and investing and fostering a culture of growth. Now, as you go about your day, I want you to think about this one thing, and it's a simple little thought but in what ways can you be more intentional in your leadership to cultivate positive team culture? Maybe you recall something from this episode or previous episodes, or forget all of that stuff and just think about that one idea what can you do to help foster and build and develop and grow a positive team culture?

Speaker 2: 15:57

Thank you for listening to the Leadership Vision podcast, our show, helping team leaders build positive team culture. For more resources about anything that you've heard here today or anything else about growing, strong people, strong teams or a strong environmental culture, you can visit our website, leadershipvisionconsultingcom for a whole bunch of more resources. We would also appreciate it if you would follow us on Apple podcasts, on Spotify. Please leave us a review. Please subscribe to our email newsletter. We send out a weekly email with all kinds of updates related to our podcast and other leadership topics. My name is Nathan Freeberg and, on behalf of our entire team, thanks for listening.